53 e
Cistercian
Caesarius of Heisterbach (d.
Mary and the Art of Prayer_Ave Maria
Perhaps, as you sing, a glint of light catches your eye, and you turn to see a pair of amber beads swaying gently in front of the image of the Blessed Virgin. Almost idly, you recall how Isabella, the wife of William Belgrafe, had bequeathed them to Our Lady along with her gold and silver ring only last year. 3 You begin to think on the joy with which Mary herself must have exulted when she understood that
she was to become Bride of God and Mother of Our Lord. Suddenly, it is as if you were present yourself at the very moment when Gabriel came to her in that "pryue chaumbure" where she was accustomed to say her prayers and meditate, with Isaiah, on the manner of the Incarnation. 4 You hear her speak:
Quoniam Deus magnus Dominus et rex magnus super omnes deos: quoniam non repellet Dominus plebem suam: quia in manu eius sunt omnes nes terre: et altitudines montium ipse conspicit.
For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods. For the Lord will not cast o his people. For in his hand are all the ends of the earth: and the heights of the mountains he beholds (vv. 3-4).
And you realize that she is waiting for you to speak in return: " e Lord is with you. " To which she responds with even greater joy:
Quoniam ipsius est mare et ipse fecit illud; et aridam fundauerunt manus eius: venite adoremus et procidamus ante Deum, ploremus coram Domino qui fecit nos: quia ipse est Dominus Deus noster: nos autem populus eius et oues pascue eius.
For the sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry land. Come, let us worship and fall down before God, let us weep before the Lord who made us: for he is the Lord our God, and we are his people and the sheep of his pasture (vv. 5-7).
You are amazed to nd your mouth lled with an extraordinary sweetness, like honey, as once again you repeat the angel's greeting: "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. "5 And in little more than a whisper, so that you are not sure whether you are hearing it or not, a voice admonishes you: "Slow down! I want to savor the joy that I have when you say those words, most especially Dominus tecum, for then it seems to me that my Son is in me, just as he was when, God and man, he deigned to be born from me for the sake of sinners. "6
Abashed, you nd yourself wanting to fall to your knees and bow down with every repetition of the angel's words and wonder what it would be like to say the salutation y, a hundred, or even a hundred and y times, when once again the Virgin's voice breaks in:
Hodie si vocem eius audieritis nolite obdurare corda vestra: sicut in exacerba- tione secundum diem tentationis in deserto vbi tentauerunt me patres vestri: probauerunt et viderunt opera mea.
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P l at e 5 Altar statue, the Virgin and Child in majesty, Auvergne, France, ca. 1175-1200. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gi of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1916, Accession number 16. 32. 194.
Image (C) e Metropolitan Museum of Art. www. metmuseum. org
If you hear his voice today, harden not your hearts: as in the provocation accord- ing to the day of temptation in the wilderness where your fathers tempted me: they proved me and saw my works (vv. 8-9).
As you answer: " e Lord is with you," you think miserably on your sins and your hardness of heart, especially your failure to honor God and his Mother as you should, for did she not su er even as her Son as he died on the cross for our sins? 7 Almost as if he could read your thoughts, her Son replies:
Quadraginta annis proximus fui generationi huic et dixi semper hi errant corde ipsi vero non cognouerunt vias meas quibus iuraui in ira mea si introibunt in requiem meam.
For forty years I was nigh to this generation, and I said: always they err in heart, for truly they have not known my ways: I swore to them in my wrath they shall never enter into my rest (vv. 10-11).
Trembling, indeed, pleading, you turn to the Virgin Mother once again: "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you," hoping against hope that she might be able to assuage the wrath of the Judge, her Son. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit," you sing. "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be: world without end. Amen. " ankfully, you hear the versicularius intone once again: "Hail Mary, full of grace," and you answer: " e Lord is with you," knowing that he "whom earth and sea and sky adore" vouchsafed in truth to be enclosed within her womb. 8
"Today," the great Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) advised his brothers as he turned their attention to the opening verse of the Song of Songs, "we read in the book of experience (Hodie legimus in libro experientiae): 'Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth. ' But," he cautioned them,
it is not given to just anyone to say these words from within (ex a ectu). . . . I think that no one is able to understand what [this kiss] is except the one who receives it; for it is a "hidden manna" [Revelation 2:17], and only he who eats it still hungers for more. It is a "sealed fountain" [Song of Songs 4:12], to which no stranger has access; only he who drinks still thirsts for more. 9
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What was it like for medieval Christians to pray, hour a er hour, day a er day, to the Virgin Mother of God? Much like Bernard when confronted with the mys- tical kiss of the Song, this is not a question that most recent scholars, including historians, have found themselves readily equipped to answer. e odd (if o en repeated) miracle story, the chipped and faded (if still much-loved) image before which her devotees were accustomed to kneel, the evocative (if historically and scripturally problematic) advice on how to imagine oneself in her earthly pres- ence, the repetitive (if poetic) chants and psalms of her liturgy: these are the frag- mentary objects and texts upon which we depend to imagine their devotional world. As the n de sie`cle American tourist Henry Adams--marveling at the forces brought to bear on the medieval construction of the Virgin's cult--once put it: "All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres. "10 And yet, like Adams, historians have been hard pressed to explain her appeal in other than the most psychologically reductive (or etic) terms, for example, because medieval monks and other clerics were simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the female body or because, as oblates, they had never known their mothers. 11 Did medieval Christians pray to her as if to a goddess, as the sixteenth- century reformers who rejected her cult feared they had and many twentieth- century feminist scholars have hoped modern Christians might? 12 Or was she rather for them a model or type of the Church, as Catholic theologians following Vatican II have tended to argue? 13
To be clear, no, not at least as we see her in the sources associated with her medieval cult. 14 Even at the height of her popularity in the Middle Ages, Mary was not revered as a goddess in the pagan sense of the term, that is, as if she were not a creature but herself somehow divine--although, as well shall see, this did not mean that she was not revered as other than a humble woman, as the six- teenth-century reformers seem to have preferred. Nor was she subsumed into the Church such that every image of her was always already understood as a type of the communal Body of Christ, as certain twentieth-century Catholic studies have tended to imply. 15 As the one who remained steadfast in faith during the days of her Son's entombment, she was the rst member of the Church that had been born in the water and blood that owed from Christ's side, but for all their love of personi cation allegories, her medieval devotees would never have insisted that she or Christ was thereby identical with, never mind subordinate to Eccle- sia. Nor would Mary's medieval devotees have accepted the preeminently Protes- tant claim that the scriptures say "so little" about her, any more than they would have accepted the more recent historical-critical insistence that, of the scriptures, only the texts of the New Testament contain any reliable information about the
life, death, and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. If, as they believed, Christ spoke to them through the Psalms, so Mary spoke to them through Proverbs, the Song of Songs, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), and the Wisdom of Solomon. Indeed, as we shall see, some like Richard of Saint-Laurent, a canon of the metropolitan chapter of Rouen, would insist that nearly all of the scriptures showed forth her praise insofar as they contain images of her spiritual and physical beauty and of the mystery of her relationship with God. Mary as her medieval devotees described her may not have been a goddess in her own right (that is, uncreated, herself the Creator)--much of the wonder of the Incarnation depended on the fact that she was not--but she had borne God in her womb, and for this reason she was not only blessed among women as her cousin Elizabeth exclaimed (Luke 1:42), but indeed exalted above all the choirs of the angels, as the rst antiphon for the rst nocturn for the feast of her Assumption proclaimed. 16
Nor was devoting oneself to the Virgin Mary somehow necessarily easier or less terrifying than praying directly to God. Mary, like the elephant, might be "lacking in bile" as the great Dominican preacher Jacobus de Voragine (d. 1298) put it and, therefore, only accidentally "severe," but even her sweetness had its limits. Like the elephant in battle, when provoked, she too could be "terrible as the ordered ranks of the army" (Song of Songs 6:3, 9), battling on humanity's behalf against the demons but also against sinners at the judgment, for whom "at the end she would no longer pray. "17 Indeed, as our imaginative exercise has already shown, prayer to Mary might be just as much an occasion for abjection over one's sins as prayer to Christ. Certainly, this is what Anselm of Canterbury found when he attempted to write a prayer worthy of her attention. "Good Lady," he prayed, "a huge dullness is between you and me, so that I am scarcely aware of the extent of my sickness. I am so lthy and stinking that I am afraid you will turn your merciful face from me. "18 e point for medieval Christians like Anselm was not that praying to Mary made prayer easy, but rather, as we shall see, that Mary, by giving her consent to bear the Creator of all things in her body and so make the God-man visible to the world, made prayer possible in a way that it had not hitherto been before. It was for this reason that Mary's medieval devotees delighted to recite the words with which the angel Gabriel had greeted her at the moment of the Incarnation: every repetition recalled for her--and them--the joy that she had felt when divinity joined itself with humanity in her womb. It was, they insisted, not possible to praise her enough, whom God had loved so much as to take his very esh from her.
"Prayer," as Dionysius the Carthusian (d. 1471) put it, following a tradition going back through omas Aquinas (d. 1274) to John of Damascus (d. 749),
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"is de ned as 'a li ing up (ascensus) of the mind and soul to God. ' "19 One of the most e ective ways to assist this mental and spiritual ascensus, or so medie- val Christians believed, was to address themselves to the woman through whom God had descended to the world in esh. Indeed, in their experience, the more o en they repeated the angel's salutation to her ("Ave Maria, gratia plena"), the deeper their appreciation of the mystery of God's Incarnation became ("Domi- nus tecum"). While later critics following the sixteenth-century reformers have tended to see in this practice either a superstitious dependence on the e cacy of sheer repetition or, more sympathetically, a powerful if nevertheless some- what mindless or mechanical form of self-hypnosis, medieval commentaries on the text--not to mention the Virgin's own plea that her devotees not say her salutation too fast--make it clear that, like the Virgin herself, Gabriel's greet- ing was pregnant with God. It was for this reason--not the Virgin's purported capriciousness in honoring her devotees--that repeating it mindfully, with devo- tion, could have such profound spiritual bene ts. Certainly, it might seem a little thing to say "Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum" y or a hundred or even a hundred and y times a day, but only if one had no sense of the mystery con- tained therein.
To judge from the sermons that they preached both within their own monastic or collegiate communities and, in the vernacular, to the laity at large, as well as the hymns, litanies, and psalters they composed in her praise, like- wise the popularity of such works as Conrad of Saxony's (d. 1279) Speculum beatae Mariae virginis, itself an extended commentary on the angelic saluta- tion, medieval monks, nuns, canons, and friars relished the opportunity to savor this mystery and encouraged their audiences to do likewise. As we shall see, one of the things that they enjoyed most was meditation on Mary's name, including all of the titles and typologies discovered of her in creation and in the scriptures. Mary, as they saw her, was God's handmaid, to be sure (Luke 1:38), but she was also Ark of the Covenant, Seat of Wisdom, Tower of Ivory, Litter of Solomon, Cedar of Lebanon, Garden of Delights, and Star of the Sea, not to mention Virgin of Virgins, Mother of Mercy, Queen of Heaven, and Bride of God. More to the point, Mary, as the Mother of God, the Creator of all things, was in Anselm's words the "mother of all re-created things. "20 e most perfect of all God's creatures, Mary herself was the most perfect mirror of God, the one--as the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri (d. 1321) put it in his Paradiso-- whose "face is most like / the face of Christ" and by whose radiance humanity is prepared for the vision of God. 21 is is the way that the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen hailed her:
O how great
in its strength is the side of man,
from which God produced the form of woman. He made her the mirror
of all his beauty
and the embrace
of his whole creation. 22
Earth, sea, and sky; sun, moon, and stars; owers, trees, spices, fruits; birds and beasts; precious metals and gemstones; the products of the mechanical, archi- tectural, and liberal arts: all were invoked as symbols for or attributes of her vir- tues and beauty. 23 A creature herself, Mary re ected the virtues and beauty of all God's creatures; and yet, she had carried within her womb "he whom the whole world could not contain. "24 is was the mystery evoked at every recitation of the angel's words: "Dominus tecum. " Little wonder if, as the Benedictine poet Gautier de Coincy (d. 1236) put it, Mary "is the sea that no one exhausts" (mers que nus n'espuise). 25 She it was whom God lled with himself.
Plate 6 Calendar, Annunciation. Book of Hours, France, ca. 1400-1414. Use of Cha^lons- sur-Marne. Chicago, e University of Chicago Library, Special Collections 26, fols. 12v-13r.
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Photo courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, e University of Chicago Library.
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SALUTING MARY: AVE
Of all of the practices associated by the later Middle Ages with devotion to the Virgin--veneration of her milk, clothing, and house(s); pilgrimage to the shrines of her wonder-working statues; imaginative meditation on the events of her life leading to the conviction that she might appear to the meditants in visions--none so exercised the concern, if not the ridicule, of the sixteenth-century reformers as the recitation of the greeting of the angel Gabriel as, in e ect, a prayer. In part one might argue that their concern was justi ed. By the later eenth cen- tury, the angel's salutation as recorded by Luke had been supplemented not only with Mary's proper name (Gabriel had said only, "Chaire, kecharitomene [? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ]," in Jerome's translation, "Ave, gratia plena"), as well as with Eliza- beth's greeting ("et benedictus fructus ventris tui," itself supplemented with Jesus' name), but also with a concluding nonscriptural plea: "Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in ora mortis. Amen. "26 Regardless of the fact that this second part of the Ave Maria was not to become standardized until the latter part of the sixteenth century (a standardization owing, not incidentally, to Protestant attacks on the recitation of the Ave Maria as such), the reformers, beginning with Martin Luther (d. 1546), were adamant that what the angel and Elizabeth had said to Mary was not a prayer but simply a greeting intended to honor and praise her. 27 As the English martyr Hugh Latimer (d. 1555) defended his rejection of the hitherto customary devotional use of the Ave:
As for the Ave Maria, who can think that I would deny it? I said it was a heavenly greeting or saluting of our blessed lady, wherein the angel Gabriel, sent from the Father of heaven, did annunciate and shew unto her the good-will of God towards her, what he would with her, and to what he had chosen her. But I said, it was not properly a prayer, as the Pater noster, which our Saviour Christ himself made for a proper prayer. 28
Arguably even more problematic than the form of the words was the way in which Christians had been accustomed to salute the Virgin. Again, in Latim- er's words: "I did not speak against well saying of [the Ave Maria], but against superstitious saying of it, and of the Pater noster too. "29 Paramount among such superstitions according to the reformers was the repeated recitation of the Ave Maria--as, for example, in the devotions of the rosary--in the hope of acquiring spiritual merit and, thereby, indulgences. Such practices were not only vain, but impious, their observance the very de nition of "popery. " Accordingly, Arch- bishop of Canterbury Edmund Grindal's Visitation Articles of 1576 speci cally
inquired whether any of the clergy encouraged their parishioners "to pray in an unknown tongue, [rather] than in English, or to put their trust in a certain num- ber of prayers, as in saying over a certain number of beads, Lady-Psalters, or other like. "30 is distrust of the mere numbering of prayers would later translate itself among the reformers' modernist descendants into a distrust of the very use of such scripted, "arti cial" prayers, for how, they argued, could any "vain exercise of words" or "mere repetition of sacred formulae" have anything to do with "the very movement itself of the soul" that is the essence of "religion in act," that is, prayer? 31 More recent phenomenological investigations have tended to be some- what more sympathetic to such regular practices as chanting the psalms or, as with the rosary, keying meditations to the repeated recitation of short phrases or mantras. 32 Contrary to the sixteenth-century reformers' conviction that such practices were at best vain, at worst the work of the devil, the tendency now is to assume that chanting Mary's name over and over again could indeed induce visions and sensations of sweetness. From this perspective, chanting almost any sacred or even not so sacred text with the proper breath control and attention would have much the same spiritual e ect. 33
Medieval Christians who devoted themselves to the recitation of the Ave Maria would have been as befuddled by the sixteenth-century reformers' insis- tence that it was "only" a salutation (that, a er all, was its point) as they would by the more recent conviction that the speci c words one uses in such exercises do not really matter. To their understanding, saluting the Virgin in Gabriel's and Elizabeth's words was not so much a prayer in the sense of a petition for something, as a service, much as chanting the Psalter as a whole in the course of the Divine O ce was a service to God. e point was not, by way of such exercises, to change one's own intellectual, spiritual, or emotional state, but to please God and his Mother. To be sure, singing the Divine O ce or saying the Ave Maria might have powerful--and, indeed, manifold--spiritual, emotional, and even corporeal e ects: stirring the soul to contrition for sins, melting the heart to greater devotion, ravishing devout souls and causing them to receive spiritual gi s, making the heart joyous and sweet, driving away evil spirits, and overcoming the bodily and spiritual enemies of the church. But, above all, as the Birgittine Myroure of oure Ladye put it, "holy chyrche songe . . . pleasyth so moche god, that he desyreth and ioyeth to here yt. "34 It was for this reason that the monks and nuns of the medieval church spent their lives singing the psalms: not because they thought thereby to achieve ecstasy (although some most certainly did), but because the Psalms were the words with which God had praised himself and therefore the words he most desired to hear. 35 As Augus- tine of Hippo explained in his commentary on Psalm 144 (Exaltabo te Deus):
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"So that God might be well praised by man, God praised himself [in the scrip- tures]; and because he has deigned to praise himself, therefore man knows how to praise him. "36
Likewise the words with which the angel Gabriel greeted the Mother of God. As Jacobus de Voragine put it, citing "Bernard," " is salutation was composed in the council chamber (in secretario) of the Trinity and written by the nger of God" (cf. Exodus 31:18). 37 To recite Gabriel's salutation was neither to ask something of Mary nor to attribute it to her divinity. Rather, it was to rejoice with her and to congratulate her, as if to say, or so Richard of Saint-Laurent put it: "O blessed Virgin, I rejoice with you and give you joy in your salvation and glory. "38 If God saw t to address her in this way through his angel, how much more ought human beings to congratulate her, being as they are in her debt for so many blessings? John the Baptist leapt in his mother's womb as Mary approached (Luke 1:41), while her Son himself rose to meet and adore her--"that is, salute her"--in heaven (3 Kings 2:19). "We ought, therefore," Jacobus chided his audi- ence, "to blush not to salute her a er such as these have saluted her. "39 Richard of Saint-Laurent was, if anything, even more forceful in his recommendations for saluting the Virgin. "When, therefore, we say Ave, Maria," he insisted, "we ought to humble ourselves before her like servants (servi) before their Lady. "40 Nor was this humiliation to be strictly spiritual:
For [Richard argued] if we salute so a ectionately and diligently, if we bare our heads, if we bow and rise to our feet and bend our knees and repeat our saluta- tion again and again to the intimate friends and relatives and companions of the great whose counsel or support we need at court, and we seek to obtain their benevolence with gi s and services, and we prevail in this way, what should we do for the mother at the court of her only Son, whom not only can she supplicate e ectively, but also command with her maternal authority? 41
Just as Mary herself served humanity in her body by giving esh to her Son, so (Richard averred) Christians ought to serve her not only in their hearts, but also with all of their bodily members and all of their senses: bowing their heads before her images whenever they passed them; averting their eyes from all vanities and praying with groans and tears; closing their ears to all obnoxious sounds and their noses to all meretricious scents; restraining their appetites so as not to give in to drunkenness or gluttony; doing good works with their hands; embracing their enemies with their arms; bending their knees before her altars and images and whenever they recited her name, "because she says with the Son: 'To me every knee shall bow' (Isaiah 45:24). "42
Saying the Ave
Stories told of the lives of the holy--and the not-so-holy--bear ample witness to these practices, particularly the reverence given to Mary's images and the genu ections with which she was regularly greeted. Moreover, as Herbert urston argued more than a century ago following the great Benedictine historians Luc d'Achery (d. 1685) and Jean Mabillon (d. 1707), such stories likewise prove that the recitation of the Ave Maria as such had its origins not as a freestanding devotion, but rather in the genu ections or bows o ered with the invitatory antiphon at the outset of the O ce of the Virgin, as, for example, in both London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii and Royal 2 B. V. 43 Once again, as with the Hours of the Virgin, Peter Damian is one of our earliest witnesses to this development. As Peter or, rather his friend Stephen, cardinal priest of the Apostolic see, told it:
I remember hearing of a certain cleric, who was simple, good for nothing, ighty and tactless. In addition, he seemed to have no talent for the religious life, no quality that re ected the gravity and decorum pertaining to canonical discipline. But among these dead ashes of a useless life, one tiny ame continued to burn. Daily he would go to the holy altar of the blessed Mother of God, and there reverently bowing his head would recite this angelic and Gospel verse (angelicum atque evangelicum versiculum): "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you: blessed are you among women. "
Eventually, the cleric's bishop caught wind of his uselessness and deprived of him the bene ce upon which he depended to live, at which the Virgin was not pleased. Appearing to the bishop in his sleep along with a man carrying a torch in one hand and a rod in the other, she ordered him to be whipped and chastised him for depriving "my chaplain who daily prayed to me" of his stipend. " ere- fore," Peter concluded, "if this cleric was rewarded with food for his body just for having sung one prayerful verse, with what con dence can those who daily recite all the hours of the o ce to the blessed queen of the world look forward to eternal refreshment? "44
As with the full O ce of the Virgin, this "abbreviated O ce" was to become popular among monastics, clergy, and laity alike over the course of the next century or so, such that even those who could say only the invitatory antiphon were able to participate in Mary's service. 45 As early as 1125, Franco, abbot of the Brabantine house of A ighem, insisted: "Of good right does every condition, every age, every degree honour Mary with the angelical salutation; of good right does every voice, every tongue, every conscious being cry aloud to Mary with
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the angel: 'Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum; benedicta tu in mulieri- bus. ' "46 As Baldwin of Ford (d. 1190, Acre), bishop of Worcester and archbishop of Canterbury, put it in one of the earliest extended commentaries on the Ave Maria: " e matter of our salvation begins with a salutation, and the commence- ment of our reconciliation is consecrated by a proclamation of peace. . . . O saving greeting, spoken by the angel, instructing us in how we should greet the Virgin! O joy of the heart, sweetness to the mouth, seasoning of love! "47 e Benedictine nun and visionary Elisabeth of Scho? nau (d. 1165), who was accustomed to salute the Virgin in this way, enjoyed a vision of Mary standing at an altar and arrayed in a vestment "like a priestly chasuble," while on her head she wore a "glorious crown decorated with four precious gems, and the angelic salutation, 'Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you,' was inscribed around it. "48
Much as Richard of Saint-Laurent had insisted they should be, these recitations of the Ave Maria were typically accompanied by genu ections, usually before her images, sometimes multiplied tens or even hundreds of times. As the biographer of the Premonstratensian canon Hermann Joseph (d. 1241) explained:
It is the common custom in our order, and I think that the same is true of other orders also, that as o en as the venerable name of the Most Holy Virgin is mentioned in the Collect, in the Creed, in the Preface, and in the Angelic Salutation which is said for the Invitatory (in Salutatione Angelica, quae dicitur pro Invitatorio), the community makes a momentary reverence (veniam) in peniten- tial or ferial seasons by falling upon their knees, and on festivals with the hand.
Hermann himself was accustomed to make a full prostration at every mention of Mary's name, at which he experienced a scent of extraordinary sweetness, more pleasing than that of any ower or other perfume. 49 According to her biogra- pher Jacques de Vitry, the beguine Marie d'Oignies was sometimes so overcome with devotion that she would salute the blessed Virgin eleven hundred times a day, keeping this observance for forty days in a row. First, she would genu ect six hundred times without pause; second, she would recite the whole Psalter, standing, genu ecting, and o ering the angelic salutation at the conclusion of each psalm; third, moved even more strongly by the spirit of devotion, she would genu ect three hundred times while striking herself with the rod of discipline, going so far as to draw blood with the last three blows "to give avor to the oth- ers"; nally, she would consummate the sacri ce (sacri cium consummabat) with y more simple genu ections. 50 Less spectacularly if no less devoutly, the teen- aged beguine Margaret of Ypres said every day four hundred Pater Nosters and four hundred Ave Marias "with the same number of genu ections, as well as y
psalms," most likely short verses accompanied by salutations to the Virgin. Worn out by these devotions, Margaret sometimes found it di cult to stand. "At such times," according to her biographer omas of Cantimpre? , "she could palpably feel the touch of two angels, one on her right side and one on her le , li ing her by the elbows," who would sustain her until she could recite ten more saluta- tions to Mary, at which she would revive and be able to nish her prayers. 51 e Cistercian nun Beatrice of Nazareth maintained a similar observance, reciting every day, "with genu ections, the psalter of the Blessed Virgin (psalterium beate virginis) which," her biographer explained, "consists of as many repetitions of the angelic salutation as there are psalms in David's psalter. "52
Strange as these devotional exercises may seem today, it would seem that in the Middle Ages the Virgin Mother was greatly pleased by such attentions, as those who related the stories of her miracles were eager to attest.
53 e Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach (d. ca. 1240) told the story of a certain recluse who lived next to the church of Saint Severinus in Cologne "during the time of the schism between Alexander and Paschal," whom the matrons of the city would o en visit. One of these women confessed to the recluse "she could not say the name of Our Lady without tasting a wonderful sweetness. " Upon being asked the cause of such a great favor, she responded: "Every day in her honor I have been accustomed to say Ave Maria y times with the same number of genu ections (veniis), through which I have earned such sweetness that all the spittle of my mouth seems to be turned to honey during the time of prayer. " Encouraged by the matron's example, the recluse took up the exercise himself. A er six weeks, he, too, began to sense in his mouth and throat a sweetness "far surpassing the sweetness of honey" every time he greeted the Virgin. 54
Other e ects of saluting the Virgin were even more tangible, if not always enjoyed by their recipients while they were alive. A certain monk who always devoutly said her Hours was healed of a tumor in his throat by a drop of her milk. 55 A monk who fell into a river and drowned on his way to see his mis- tress was rescued from the demons who came to demand his soul because, as the Virgin said, "I know that he never le the monastery without saluting me. "56 A certain cleric who drowned while drunk was buried in unconsecrated ground until, that is, his body was exhumed and a tag was found hanging from his mouth inscribed with the words with which he had been accustomed to salute the Vir- gin: "Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. "57 An unlettered knight who had entered the Cistercian order but could learn only the two words "Ave Maria" was found a er his burial to have a lily growing from his mouth on one leaf of which were inscribed in letters of gold the same two words with which he had so devoutly honored the Virgin. 58
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Sometimes the circumstances were even more complicated, o en leading more recent readers to insist that Mary rewarded her devotees without regard for their overall spiritual or moral status. 59 And yet, as Anne Clark has elegantly shown, such stories of Mary's favor "o en suggest a more subtle message in which devo- tion to Mary is part of a complex religiosity. "60 One such story, rst recounted by the Benedictine Guibert of Nogent (d. 1124) and retold numerous times thereaf- ter, including in the vernacular, concerned an adulteress, the wife of whose lover prayed to the Virgin to punish her, only to be told that the Virgin couldn't:
Why [the Virgin reproved the wife in a vision] do you ask me for revenge over that woman? Clearly I can do nothing against her because daily she announces to me my joy, than which nothing is more pleasing for me to hear from any creature. Do you think that against her on your behalf I ought to be provoked, who, as if to remind me, cries out so sedulously concerning my ine able glory? 61
Other versions of the story recounted how the adulteress made her devotions before the image of the Virgin "every day on bare knees" (Jean Gobi), "[bowing] a hundred times, with her forehead touching the ground" (Alfonso X). All, how- ever, emphasized how her devotions rendered her apparently immune against the Virgin's anger. 62 Understandably incensed at the Virgin's reply and vowing to withdraw her own devotional attentions since the Virgin would not (again, apparently) help her, the wife railed against her rival when she met her entering the church: "O most foul one, how many torments will you in ict on my soul? "
I had only one hope, that the Virgin Mother of God might cast sentence of revenge against you, but already I have failed utterly in this hope, for she told me that that Ave, with which you capture her attention every day, has so ened her to such a degree that it is unbe tting for her to do anything against you. 63
At which--perhaps contrary to expectations if not to the logic of the story--the adulteress immediately repented and, in one version at least, knelt before the Vir- gin's image and vowed to become a nun. 64 As the cantigas of King Alfonso X el Sabio (d. 1284) told it: " us the Virgin caused these two women to mend their quarrel, whereas formerly they had snarled at each other with hatred as bitter as green grape juice. "65 As Clark has observed, the point of the story is not that saluting the Virgin allows the adulteress somehow to "get away" with her sin, but rather that her devotions accomplish not only her conversion but also her rec- onciliation with the woman whom she had wronged. Like the knight who con- verted from a life of robbery upon learning that the only thing protecting him
from a demon sent to capture his soul was his daily recitation of the Ave Maria, so with the adulteress: there was nothing that pleased the Virgin and dismayed the demons so much as reminding the Mother of God of her greatest joy. 66
Nor was it enough to say the angelic salutation a certain number of times without proper attention or in a rush. Again, King Alfonso's cantigas related a story that was widely known of a nun (in other versions, named Eulalia, some- times of Saxony, at others of Saint Edward's at Sha esbury) who was accustomed to say every day a thousand Ave Marias with much "weeping and moaning and a great deal of sighing. " One night, however, the Virgin herself appeared to the nun (some said while she was asleep; others, including Alfonso's cantiga, that she was not) and reproved her:
If you wish me to be pleased by your prayer, when you say the salutation which the holy angel gave me, say it calmly and do not hurry, for we assure you that when I hear how God visited me, I derive so much pleasure therefrom . . . that I tell you it seems to me then that I have God the Father [sic], Beloved and Son, within my body again. erefore, we beseech you that you adopt a way of pray- ing very slowly. . . . Leave out two parts of what you formerly said and say well the third, and we shall love you more for this. 67
As other versions made clear, the delight that the Virgin experienced on hearing the words Dominus tecum "uttered lingeringly" (prolixius) was itself impossible to express in words, so great a thrill of joy (magnum gaudium) had she experi- enced on feeling her Son within her when he deigned to be born from her for the salvation of humankind. 68 ink of the butter ies that you feel in your gut on catching sight of your beloved or, if you have been pregnant, the feeling of your child moving in your womb for the rst time multiplied beyond reckoning, as if somehow you could contain the whole of creation in your very body. is--her medieval devotees were convinced--was what the Virgin felt every time they saluted her with these words. As the Carthusian Ludolph of Saxony (d. 1377) put it in his popular Vita Christi, citing "Bernard": "For you, Virgin Mary, to hear this angelic verse, the Ave, was like a kiss. Indeed, most blessed one, you are kissed as o en as you are devoutly greeted by the Ave. erefore," he urged his readers, "go to her image, bend your knees, and press kisses upon it, and say the Ave. "69
Signi cantly, it was not only the Virgin who bene ted from such recitations, as the nun Gertrude of Hel a learned one year as she and her sisters celebrated the Feast of the Annunciation. On the vigil of the feast, when the martyrology was read, Gertrude saw Christ turn to his Mother and "[salute] her with a most pleasing inclination of his head, as if to renew in her that sweet and inestimable
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joy which she had felt when His incomprehensible Divinity took esh in her womb, and united itself to our nature. "70 Even more striking, or so one of her sisters recorded, was the vision that Gertrude experienced as the nuns intoned the invitatory for the O ce of the feast itself:71
While the Ave Maria was chanted at Matins, Gertrude beheld three most e ca- cious streams, which owed with a sweet impetuosity from the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit into the heart of the Blessed Virgin, and owed back again from her heart with the same e cacious impetuosity to their original source. By this in owing of the Holy Trinity, it was given to the Blessed Virgin to be the most powerful a er the Father, most wise a er the Son, and most benign a er the Holy Spirit. Gertrude understood also that every time the angelic salutation, that is, the Ave Maria, is recited with devotion by the faithful on earth, that these aforesaid streams over owing with an even more e cacious force, owed over the Blessed Virgin and into her most holy heart, and thus with a wonder- ful sweetness returned to their source. From that over owing, little streams of joy, of delight, and of eternal salvation are splashed over on the persons of all the saints and angels, and especially on those on earth who are mindful of the angelic salutation, through which in every one is renewed every good which they have obtained through the Incarnation of the Son of God. 72
At Gertrude's wondering what form of devotion would be most acceptable to the Virgin at this time, the Mother of God instructed her to say forty- ve Ave Marias each day during the octave of the feast, that is, forty- ve times six or 270 repetitions of the salutation, the same as the number of days that her Son spent in her womb. 73
Once again, such service was so pleasing to the Virgin as to render her inca- pable of refusing anything that her devotees might ask, for indeed, the Virgin explained, "they would [thereby have rendered] her the same service as if they had attended her with the greatest care from the moment of conception to the time of the birth. " Accordingly, the Virgin went on, this was the way in which Gertrude should say the salutation. At the word "Ave" she should desire "the alle- viation of those weighed down with heaviness. " At the word "Maria" she should look for "the penitent to continue in good works. " At the words gratia plena she should long for "the taste of grace for those who had it not. " At the words Domi- nus tecum she should ask "indulgence for all sinners," while at benedicta tu in mulieribus she should desire "grace for those who had begun to live well. " At ben- edictus uctus ventris tui she should long for "the perfection of the elect. " Finally, she should conclude each Ave with the words Jesus, splendor paternae charitatis
[ Jesus, splendor of fatherly love] "for true knowledge," and gura substantiae ejus [ gure of his substance] "for Divine love. "74 Another time, when Gertrude had o ered the Virgin a hundred and y Aves, "praying that she might be pres- ent in her maternal piety at the hour of [Gertrude's] death," every word that she repeated appeared "like a piece of gold o ered before the tribunal of the Judge, and commended by him to his Mother," who, like a good steward, kept them until that time as she should need them for Gertrude's consolation and aid at her death. 75 In return Gertrude o ered similar sets of Aves along with the one hundred y psalms to assist her sisters at their death. 76
Learning the Ave
Under such circumstances it was therefore hardly a small thing--as it were, merely an educational minimum--to insist, as did diocese a er diocese over the course of the thirteenth century, that every Christian man and woman know how to recite the angelic salutation and do so as the council held at Coventry in 1237 mandated, "seven times a day," as per the injunction of "the Prophet, who said, 'I have praised you seven times a day. ' "77 Such legislation makes clear once again that saying the Ave Maria was understood as itself an abbreviated form of the full canonical o ce of seven hours o ered in praise of the Virgin. So, for example, according to the Ancrene Wisse, while the recluses themselves were expected to say the Hours of the Virgin kneeling or bowing every time they said Mary's name, as we have seen, those who did not know the full O ce or for some reason or other could not say it were to recite thirty Pater Nosters, with an Ave Maria a er each Pater, and a Gloria Patri a er each Ave for Matins; likewise, they were to say twenty Paters, Aves, and Glorias for Vespers and een each at every other hour. Presumably these recitations did not include the ve Aves that every anchoress was expected to say each morning kneeling before Mary's statue and the Pater and Ave that she was to say before and a er each of the seven daily hours, nor the multiple repetitions of Paters and Aves throughout the day accompanying her other devotions to God and the Virgin, but this is not clear. e sisters were, however, allowed to cut ten repetitions along with their genu ections from Mat- ins and ve each from the other hours if they were ill. 78
Likewise, as we have seen, there were the statutes promulgated at more or less the same time throughout Europe allowing all those serving in hospitals to sub- stitute recitations of the Pater Noster and Ave Maria for the o ces they might otherwise not be able to say. 79 As the statutes for the hospital of Notre-Dame founded in 1237 by the countess Jeanne of Lille explained, the sisters and lay
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brother who knew them were to say the Hours of the Virgin, while those who did not were to observe the following ordo: twenty- ve Pater Nosters and as many Ave Marias or seven psalms or seven repetitions of Miserere mei Deus (Psalm 50) at Matins; seven Pater Nosters and as many Ave Marias or two repetitions of Mis- erere mei Deus at each of the hours of Prime, Terce, Sext, None, and Compline; ten Pater Nosters and as many Ave Marias or three repetitions of Miserere mei Deus at Vespers, thus ful lling the service of the canonical hours despite the fact that they did not (yet? ) know the full text of the Marian O ce. 80
Similar concerns would appear to be behind the rules of life for the various confraternities of the Virgin established over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 81 e instructions for the observance kept by the Domin- ican confraternities of Pisa according to the rule established in 1312 are partic- ularly telling. While the clergy were to recite the full Divine O ce and those who were not clergy but were able to read were to say the Hours of the Virgin, the other members of the confraternity were to say every day twenty- ve Pater Nosters and twenty- ve Ave Marias with a Gloria Patri followed by a brief lauda: "Benedetto sia lo nome del nostro segnore Ihesus Christo e della sua dolce madre Vergine Maria. " e Pater Nosters and Ave Marias were to be distributed over the course of the day, with ve each to be said at Matins and Vespers, and three for each of the four Little Hours plus Compline. 82 Similar provisions were made by the Penitents of Saint Dominic. e brothers and sisters were required to say the canonical hours (horas canonicas) daily, consisting of twenty-eight Pater Nosters and Ave Marias for Matins, fourteen Pater Nosters and Ave Marias for Vespers, and seven Pater Nosters and Ave Marias for each of the other hours. 83
Notably, both of these confraternity rules also include instructions for saying additional Pater Nosters and Ave Marias. At Pisa, while the clergy and laity who knew them were to say the Seven Penitential Psalms every day "for the living and the dead of our company," everyone else was to substitute seven Pater Nosters and seven Ave Marias following the Requiem aeternam. 84 Likewise at Pisa, everyone was to say a Pater Noster, an Ave Maria and the Gloria Patri both before and a er eating, along with the lauda: "Benedecto sia quel segnore, che ci a` creato, recom- perato e pasciuto, e ongne fedele anima defunta per la misericordia di Dio riposi in sancta pace. Amen. "85 Among the order of the Penitents of Saint Dominic, those who knew them would say either Miserere mei Deus (Psalm 50) or Laudate (Psalm 148 or 150? ) before and a er meals, while the others would say a Pater Noster. 86 As with the provisions made for the hours at Lille, so with the rules of the confraternities and order of Penitents, structurally the Pater Nosters and Ave Marias were clearly standing in for the psalms that the brothers and sisters would otherwise say, pointing at once to the importance attached to praying according
to the canonical horarium and to the way in which saying the Ave Maria, like the Divine O ce itself, was understood as a service to God.
Instruction in saying the Pater Noster and Ave Maria was accordingly wide- spread, including in some regions e orts to make the texts available in the ver- nacular, whether as a part of the O ce of the Virgin or incorporated into more extended, o en poetic meditations on the Ave Maria itself. 87 Arguably even more signi cant was the provision made by the friars, particularly in the context of the Marian confraternities, for preaching every Wednesday (Dominicans) or Friday (Franciscans) of the week, in addition to the sermons that were preached every day throughout Lent and on feast days. 88 Such sermons might range over the whole content of the liturgical year, necessarily including each of the four major feasts of the Virgin (Puri cation, Annunciation, Assumption, and Nativity). At least once a year, on the Annunciation (March 25), congregations would hear a sermon on the signi cance of the angel's greeting. Some of these sermons were preached extempore, but some were collected and published as models for sub- sequent delivery, thus providing an important glimpse into the way in which late medieval audiences were taught to think about the Ave Maria and the Virgin Mother to whom it was addressed. 89
But this was not all. For those friars and other clergy interested in exploring the mystery of the angelic salutation in more depth, perhaps simply for them- selves, perhaps in preparation for their own sermons, in addition to these model sermons, a number of thirteenth-century commentators penned whole treatises explicating Gabriel's and Elizabeth's words, one of the most prominent of which was the commentary on the Ave Maria or Speculum seu salutatio beatae Mar- iae virginis written by the Franciscan Conrad of Saxony. 90 In similar fashion, the Rouen canon Richard of Saint-Laurent framed his De laudibus beatae Mariae virginis as an exposition of the angelic salutation, while an anonymous Austrian or Bavarian monastic contemporary compiled some two hundred thirty quaes- tiones on the particulars of the evangelical event. 91 Friars like Conrad seem to have particularly enjoyed meditations on Mary's name. e Franciscan preacher Servasanctus of Faenza (d. ca. 1300) compiled a whole psalter of titles based on a declension of the grammatical elements (letters, syllables, words, phrases) in the salvi c exordium (Luke 1:28), while late in life, the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine added to the Marian sermons that he had preached during the litur- gical year a compilation of one hundred sixty meditations on her various titles, symbols, and attributes, arranged according to the letters of the alphabet. 92 For Servasanctus, as, indeed, for Richard, unlocking the mystery of the angel's Ave involved understanding the whole of creation, while for Jacobus, every recitation of the angelic salutation invoked a veritable encyclopedia of names for the Virgin Mother of God.
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Almost unknown today, all ve of these works enjoyed a marked popularity throughout the later Middle Ages and well into the seventeenth century. Long believed to be the work of the Franciscan Saint Bonaventure, Conrad's Speculum survives in some 247 known manuscripts, the vast majority from the fourteenth and eenth centuries, with provenances from across both eastern and western Europe. 93 Running to some 840 double-columned pages in the 1898 edition, Richard's De laudibus beatae Mariae virginis was nevertheless copied into man- uscript upward of thirty times, while the Mariale, sive CCXXX quaestiones super Evangelium "Missus est Angelus Gabriel," running to more than three hundred double-columned pages in the same 1898 edition, is known in as many as thir- ty-two extant copies, including copies made before 1300 in both Cologne and Paris. 94 Servasanctus's one hundred- y-chapter Mariale is extant in some een known manuscripts with provenances ranging from the Franciscan convent of Santa Croce in Florence to the cathedral library in Valencia, the Augustinian house at Glatz (Bohemia), the Benedictine community of Bury St. Edmunds, the Carmelite house in Paris, the Augustinian house at Bordeaux, and the monastery of Saint Cyprian in Murano (this last copy also includes an incomplete version of Richard's De laudibus). 95 Albeit hardly as well known as his Legenda aurea, Jaco- bus's alphabetic Mariale also enjoyed a wide circulation, surviving in as many as sixty fourteenth- and eenth-century manuscripts, as well as at least three early printed editions. 96 Conrad's Speculum was printed four times by 1521 as the work of Bonaventure,97 while Richard's De laudibus beatae Mariae virginis passed into print as early as 1473 along with the Mariale, sive CCXXX quaestiones super Evangelium as the work of the Dominican Albert the Great. 98 Although Rich- ard's De laudibus beatae Mariae virginis was published under his own name by Jean Bogard in 1625 (as well as among the works of Albert in 1651),99 the Mariale, sive CCXXX quaestiones super Evangelium was accepted as the work of Albert until 1952. 100 Meanwhile, the copy of Servasanctus's Mariale, which had made its way from Bologna to Glatz as a gi of Archbishop Ernestus of Prague (d. 1364), was printed in 1651 as the work of the archbishop himself. 101
It would be easy to go on. Almost every aspect of late medieval European Christian religious life was marked--and enhanced--by salutation of the Virgin. From the invitatory sung at Matins to the threefold Ave Marias recited with the Franciscans' encouragement at the ringing of the bells at the end of the day (the "Angelus"), from the multiple genu ections made before the images of Mary to the ubiquitous altarpieces and Books of Hours depicting the angel kneeling
before the Virgin in imitation of her earthly devotees, from the Mary-psalters of the twel h, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries to the fully developed rosary of the eenth said while ngering one's beads, the mystery of the words spoken by the angel was invoked aurally, visually, corporeally, and haptically day a er day. 102 So familiar, indeed, was the practice of saying the Ave Maria that it might even be used, as one late fourteenth-century handbook for household manage- ment famously put it, to time how long one should allow eggs to cook or sugar to melt for a glaze. 103 And yet, for all its familiarity, the Ave Maria never ceased to enchant. Just as the Virgin herself never wearied of being reminded of her joy, so her devotees--monks, nuns, friars, canons, clerics, beguines, anchoresses, lay brothers and sisters, kings, ladies, knights, matrons, and members of her confraternities--seem never to have wearied of saluting her, for, as their poetic reiterations of the angel's greeting, likewise their commentaries, sermons, and treatises made clear, these were words that contained a mystery in which they themselves longed to participate and yet which mere words could hardly contain.
"Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth" (Song of Songs 1:1). is--or so her medieval devotees averred--is what Mary exclaimed when she under- stood herself about to bear in her womb "him whom kings and prophets had not deserved to hear or see. "104 "What is this exclamation so great, so unlooked for? ," wondered the Benedictine abbot Rupert of Deutz at the beginning of his commentary on the Song of Songs de Incarnatione Domini:
O blessed Mary, the inundation of joy, the force of love, the torrent of delight covered you entirely, possessed you totally, intoxicated you inwardly, and you sensed what eye has not seen and ear has not heard and what has not entered into the heart of man, and you said: "Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth. "105
is was the mystery of Mary's overshadowing, the mystery of the kiss with which the Trinity espoused her at the moment of the Incarnation. As the great teacher (Doctor Universalis) Alan of Lille (d. 1203) explained in his commentary on the Song of Songs, the kiss of verse 1:1 was a triple kiss, the rst kiss being that of the Incarnation by which the divine is joined to human nature; the second, that of the Holy Spirit, by which the Son kisses the Father and the Father loves the Son; the third, that of the presence of the doctrine of Christ. " ese are the kisses," Alan elaborated, "by which the Father kisses the Son, the bridegroom the bride, the Lord the handmaiden, the son the mother, the nursling the nurse. " Accord- ingly, these were the kisses that Mary invited on hearing the angel's "Ave. "106
e Premonstratensian prior Philip of Harvengt (d. 1183) was, if anything, even more explicit, particularly about the identity of Mary's divine lover.
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According to Philip, "hearing that she had been betrothed to the Son of God and was to give birth to God and man," the Virgin burned with the Spirit or rather with love, for that which the angel had promised was to be accomplished in her. As the Virgin herself remembered the moment: " e voice of the angel that had told me of such great blessings fell silent, and the Son of God who betrothed himself to me a virgin approached," at which she cried out:
Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth. . . . Let him touch me with his mouth; let his touch ll me with great grace; let him deem me worthy of his kiss; let him make me fertile with his spirit. For indeed there is in a kiss of the mouth not only the exterior joining of the lips, but also a certain internal exhalation, which if it is pure will be lled with a sweet taste, as if the one kissing pours a sweet spirit into the one kissed. 107
Who could not--Philip's contemporary Amadeus, the Cistercian bishop of Lausanne (d. 1159), enthused--want to know what Mary's experience at this moment had been like? As Amadeus apostrophized the Virgin ("the most precious impress of the divine seal [agalma], the most holy vessel in which the Word of God was conceived") in the third of eight homilies that he composed in her praise:
We pray you, Lady, most worthy Mother of God, not to scorn those who seek in fearfulness, ask in piety, knock in love; we ask, by what feeling were you moved, by what love were you held, by what incitement were you stirred when these things took place in you and the Word took esh from you? Where was your soul, where your heart, where your mind, where your sense, where your reason? 108
Amadeus was not the rst nor the last to be seized by this pious curiosity. 109 Some two hundred years later, Mary's devotees were still wondering, in response to which the Carthusian Ludolph of Saxony suggested a remedy, purportedly citing Amadeus's own teacher, Bernard:
O, if you were strong enough to sense of what sort and how great was that re sent from heaven, that consolation conferred, that solace infused! how great the li ing up of the Virgin Mother, how great the ennoblement of the human race, how great the condescension of majesty! If you are able to hear the Virgin singing with joy, I think that you should begin to rejoice with her equally for so great a blessing and never cease to sing thanks to God. So that therefore you may be able to renew such a great joy for the Virgin and recall it to mind, do not neglect to salute her repeatedly with the sweet verse of the Angel and to imprint kisses of devout salutation on her feet, saying: Ave, Maria. 110
Two hundred years earlier, Amadeus' contemporary and fellow Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx (cited by Ludolph as "Anselm") had been equally insistent in advising his sister in her life as a recluse on how she was to imagine the arrival of the angel in the Virgin's chamber:
Hear him as he utters his greeting, and so, lled with amazement and rapt out of yourself, greet your most sweet Lady together with the angel. Cry out with a loud voice: "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you, blessed are you among women. " Repeat this several times and consider what this fullness of grace is in which the whole world shared when the Word was made esh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. Wonder at the Lord who lls earth and heaven being enclosed within the womb of a maiden, whom the Father sancti ed, the Son made fertile, and the Holy Spirit overshadowed. 111
It would be surprising indeed if such regular practice did not leave a sweet taste in the mouth.
P l at e 7 Annunciation, "Incipit horae beatae marie virginis. " Book of Hours, Belgium, ca. 1475. Use of Ghent. Chicago, e University of Chicago Library, Special Collections 184, fols. 61v-62r.
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NAMING MARY: MARIA
Sweet it may have been to repeat the angel's salutation in this way, but who, a er all, was this maiden to whom Gabriel had been sent? Even with the angel's example it was--or so her medieval devotees soon realized--another thing altogether to adequately describe, not to mention praise, the one saluted daily in their recitation of her Hours in whose womb "the Lord who lls earth and heaven" had been enclosed. For many, like the Franciscan Walter of Wimborne ( . 1260s), it was di cult to even know where to begin. As Walter confessed at the outset of his Marie Carmina, a poetic retelling of the life of Mary and Christ:
Once I wrote a song of Mary
Six in feet, its truth contrary.
Now verse I draw from quiver rude;
O grace, let me a poet prove.
In praise I sharpen blunted pen
To cry the Virgin's praise again.
But, oh, that words would harmonize
In style with that which I do prize.
Vile, brief, and rude though writing be, In praise of you, it's oratory.
And all the writer bums become
Like tongues of angels, cherubim.
If all the world turned into quills
And atoms scribes, for all their skills
is host could not her praise reveal
Nor even match the Virgin's heel.
As many scribes as there are leaves, Rocks, pebbles, groves, or dripping seas Could not the Virgin worthily
Describe in all eternity.
If scribes were numbered with the stars at twinkle in the face of Mars
Or drops of rain that on earth fall,
e matter's weight would crush them all. To praise, therefore, love urges me
e Virgin in her majesty;
And mildly she calls me to stand,
e o ered reed to take in hand. But I that pen accept with fear; To her dictation I adhere, Incapable of nding sense,
With her support my sole defense. My reed is blunt and rather slow; My love lukewarm, my thinking low. A student rude, I take my seat
To write that which she says is meet. 112
But why was it so di cult to write about Mary? Surely, as the sixteenth-century reformers would insist, everything that one needed to know about her had been encompassed in her response to the angel's greeting (Luke 1:38: "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord"): namely, that she was humble and obedient, a true handmaiden (ancilla) of God, most likely engaged in housework when the angel arrived. 113 What more needed to be said? In a word: everything. Praising Mary, or so her medieval devotees contended, was more than simply a matter of showing the proper respect to the woman in whom God had taken up his dwelling on earth. It was in a very real sense an exercise in praising God, for it was a er all he to whom she had given birth.
What did it mean to say with the prophet Jeremiah, "the Lord has created a new thing on the earth: a woman shall compass a man" (31:22), when that "man" was himself the Creator of heaven and earth? Or with Ecclesiasticus, "he that made me rested in my tabernacle" (24:12), when that "tabernacle" was the space of the Virgin's womb? Visually, the magnitude of the mystery is perhaps best expressed through contemporary iconography of the mappa mundi. For exam- ple, in the monumental map made in the late thirteenth century for the Bene- dictine convent at Ebstorf in Lower Saxony, the world itself is shown as the body of Christ with his head, hands, and feet peeking just over the oceanic frame, and in the late thirteenth-century map now in the cathedral at Hereford, as it was originally framed, Gabriel and Mary stood on either side of the world, enclosing the creation in the moment of the angel's greeting. 114 Representations of Christ as Creator such as those that appear as frontispieces for a number of the more lav- ishly illustrated thirteenth-century Bibles moralise? e make a similar point: Christ enthroned holds the cosmos in his bosom with his le hand while he measures its dimensions with an architect's compass in his right. 115 And yet, it was in just this way, or so her devotees marveled, that Mary had carried Christ in her womb and supported him as a baby on her lap, just as they beheld her doing every day in the sculpted and painted images before which they knelt in prayer. 116
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e miracle was not just that a virgin had become pregnant and given birth, but rather that he who was the Creator of all things had entered into his own creation--the Artist into his Work--by way of one of his own creatures and, further, had lived for nine months in her womb. What kind of artist (artifex) not only could, but would be willing to become subject in this way to the material limitations of his own art? It would be as if the Oxford philologist J. R. R. Tol- kien (d. 1973) were somehow not simply the author of e Lord of the Rings, but there in the story with Frodo, Sam, and Gollum, struggling their way into Mordor; or with Eowyn and Merry, ghting the Witch King to the death; or with Pippin trying to persuade Gandalf to come to Faramir's aid. But, again, this is what medieval Christians believed: that the Maker had somehow entered "into the thing that He [had] made . . . than which He is beyond measure greater," like the "singer into his tale or the designer into his picture. How"--or so the devout Catholic Tolkien imagined his artistic subcreation the woman Andreth wonder- ing as she whispered of this hope to the Elf Finrod--"could He the greater do this? Would it not shatter Arda [the world], or indeed all of Ea? [creation]? "117
Medieval Christians wondered much the same thing. How could the Maker of heaven and earth enter into his creation--physically, materially, corporeally, historically--without shattering the very thing he had made? eir answer: through Mary. "O Lady," Anselm of Canterbury marveled in the third of the three great prayers that he wrote in her praise, "you showed to the sight of all the world its Creator whom it had not seen. . .
